The present invention relates to an apparatus for subjecting a long cloth to such a treatment as desizing, scouring, dyeing, milling and weight reduction continuously by wet heat treating the cloth in a high pressure steamer.
For subjecting a long cloth to such a treatment as desizing, scouring, dyeing, milling and weight reduction, there have been such processes, for instance, as the use of a perble range as disclosed by the present inventors and the use of a high pressure steamer as disclosed also by the present inventors. To describe the outline of the use of a perble range for the pretreatment of a cloth, the cloth to be treated is soaked with a caustic alkali solution, supplied in a reactor saturated with steam and steamed. In pretreating a cloth by using a high pressure steamer, for instance, the cloth to be treated is passed through a caustic solution stored in a liquid seal tank provided in the inlet side seal mechanism of a high pressure steamer, and the cloth is wet heat treated or steamed in the high pressure steamer body. In any of the two processes, the soaking of a cloth with a treating solution is done only one time prior to the wet heat treatment, so that the application of the treating solution is frequently insufficient according to the kind of cloth.
In soaking a cloth with a treating solution in a liquid tank provided outside of a high pressure steamer body, which is done also frequently in wet heat treating a cloth in a high pressure steamer, since the treating solution is at the normal temperature, the permeability of the treating solution to the cloth is inferior as compared with the case of a high temperature solution. The method of heating the treating solution outside of a steamer body consumes a large amount of heat energy uneconomically. It has been considered to supplement the application of a treating solution to the cloth in the steamer body by providing a liquid tank therein. By supplying a large amount of treating solution at normal temperature into the interior of the steamer body, however, the temperature of the steamer body is lowered and this causes steam to condense therein and the amount of treating solution in the treating tank is diminished to prevent the uniform wet heat treatment of the cloth.
Due to the increasing demand for high quality, mix-spinned, mix-knitted and mix-woven cloths of foreign fibers have been widely produced in recent years. In order to subject these cloths to the above-mentioned treatments and to obtain good results, a large amount of water and moisture must be applied to the cloth, and an excellent treatment can hardly be expected in a short period with these conventional methods.
Further, while the production of a very thick nylon cloth (for instance, Oxford) has been realized recently by weaving 100% nylon fibers with a denier of 210, in pretreating and dyeing such a very thick cloth by the conventional method of wet heat treatment, the cloth width becomes uneven due to the formation of wavy selvages, causing such problems in the subsequent treating steps that the transportation by nipping the selvages is difficult and dyeing speck occurs.